Featured Post

I submitted my first piece of writing when I was seventeen, a story about my first job, working at the employee cafeteria at General Telephone where my mother was a dispatcher. Rolling the 20# white bond backed by a sheet of thin blue carbon paper into my Smith Corona, I typed it out slowly, carefully, on a piece of erasable paper—and mailed it off to Cosmopolitan along with a cover letter. Not just to any editor at Cosmo, by the way, I sent it directly to Helen Gurley Brown.

The piece itself, meant to be comical, was full of clumsy attempts at self-effacing humor. I strived for a similar tone in the cover letter I addressed to Brown, completely clueless that the high powered editor in chief wasn’t the one reading unsolicited manuscripts. After I signed off I added the following PS. I could have said I was Joyce Carol Oates. What I thought that would accomplish I can’t imagine. That an unsatisfactory submission would get published because of a lame joke?

A guy, a girl, and a GTO [Memoir—also on iTunes and SoundCloud]

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

We were such a cliché. We sat in Derek’s car for hours that night. Just talking. His dark blue and white GTO parked in front of my apartment building, everything quiet, the street dark, the grocery store parking lot across the road, empty. Once I noticed a shaft of yellow shine down from our 2nd story living room window; someone, my sister, my parents maybe, pulling back the curtain to peek down and check on me. I looked away quickly, like a kid covering her eyes—if I can’t see you, you can’t see me—praying no one came down and made a scene. The way my parents had when I didn’t get home from Disneyland until after 2 o’clock in the morning.Songs must have played on Derek’s tape deck. Or maybe it was the radio. It could have been the Stones, it could have been the long version of American Pie. Like a soundtrack to a movie it was justbackground music. The audience might notice it but to the actors, wrapped up in their scene, it isn’t really there.We sat in his car, on his dark leather seats, facing each other but leaning away from each other as far as we could, our backs pushed up against the faux leather doors of the car, oblivious to the door handle pushing into our skin, taking each other in.The gear shift in the center console between us was like a bundling board, our faces stuck in that absurd state of suspended disbelief when you just can’t get over the inane fact that you are the object of desire for the object of your own desire. Every move they make becomes a tell. Every motion an overture. The fingertip trailing the top stitch on the leather seam of the upholstery. Back and forth, back and forth. The scratching of the chin with the back of the hand. The shake of the head, sending hair tumbling forward. The hand, skimming over it, smoothing it back into place. The fingers turning the metal knob on the AM radio dial, between thumb and forefinger, gently, gently, to the right.Later, months later, I would make him take me to the The Brown Derby and we’d sit in a dark leather booth and I’d sneer at him over the menu of the famous high-priced restaurant I knew he couldn’t afford. I’d sit, straight-faced, defiantly voicing the most expensive menu choices aloud, raising my eyebrows disdainfully if he mentioned money. Punishing him for loving me, disgusted he could allow me to be so cruel, I did everything I could to make him break up with me. But that was later, months later. First would come sit-com happy days that went on forever. Days that started with that night, sitting in his car, stupid smiles on our faces. Stupefied by our imagined moments to come, savoring the sensation, ignorant of what was to be. Me, aching to reach across the divide and touch the woven strip of leather circling his wrist. Him, telling me he liked me the very first time he saw me. The very first time.

•••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing about old boyfriends for awhile. My last entry about Derek is In the Cups

If you liked this post please forward it to a friend or share it on social media. Thanks!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

We can't all be British. Yes, some of us love our British telly, are dotty for real football players—especially when they look like David Beckham—and actors like Benedict can grab our Cumberbatch anytime, but that doesn't make us True Brits. True Brits know teddibly, teddibly brilliant British-y things. Like the fact that being married to a prince doesn't mean we call Kate Middleton, Princess Kate. Her Royal Highness is actually a duchess. And William? He's not just a prince, he's a duke. Somehow that's even better than being an ordinary Royal type prince. Don't worry, even True Brits don't know exactly why.

But you might be a Brit at heart if :You know PG Tips aren't pointers on your golf game.

You know pasties are a kind of pie, not something that would make the Queen blush.

When the flags start waving on the fourth of July, you pour one out for King George.

You know a cock-up is just another way of saying snafu. Unless you're a wanker.

I submitted my first piece of writing when I was seventeen, a story about my first job, working at the employee cafeteria at General Telephone where my mother was a dispatcher. Rolling the 20# white bond backed by a sheet of thin blue carbon paper into my Smith Corona, I typed it out slowly, carefully, on a piece of erasable paper—and mailed it off to Cosmopolitan along with a cover letter. Not just to any editor at Cosmo, by the way, I sent it directly to Helen Gurley Brown.

The piece itself, meant to be comical, was full of clumsy attempts at self-effacing humor. I strived for a similar tone in the cover letter I addressed to Brown, completely clueless that the high powered editor in chief wasn’t the one reading unsolicited manuscripts. After I signed off I added the following PS. I could have said I was Joyce Carol Oates. What I thought that would accomplish I can’t imagine. That an unsatisfactory submission would get published because of a lame joke?

IT WAS A TIME OF TANS, BLONDS AND HOT PANTS, WHEN THE ENDLESS SUMMER WAS JUST A SHORT WALK DOWN A HOT SIDEWALK Beach Music, an On the Street Where I Livestories is really a tale of two cities; San Juan, Puerto Rico and Santa Monica, California. It was originally published in the LA Times Sunday Magazine.

Beach Music
We came to California from Canada, with a detour to Puerto Rico that lasted one endless summer of a year. A year in which I turned 15, and my hair turned blond from living in the sun. “Psst,” the boys and men would call after me in the blue-cobbled streets of San Juan. “Psst! Hey, blondie. Psst! Hey, cutie pie.”
I was devastated when my parents said we had to go, that it was time to leave the island so that my older brother, Russell, could get a first rate education.
The plan was to drive cross country from Miami and settle in San Francisco so that my brother could finish high school before going on to UC Berkeley. But, once we got there in the fall of 1968, we found that …

So proud to march with my husband & my family in Santa MonicaWow! What an amazing moment in our country’s history. Just got home from the March for Our Lives event in Santa Monica and turned on the TV to see the massive numbers of people who marched in Washington—as many as a million—and millions more who marched around the country and the world. Including my sister in law Susan and her husband Dave, marching in Riverside. Not exactly the liberal bastion Santa Monica is. A question for the politicians: Can you count the votes?

I love Eva’s sign “Arms are for Hugging’’While there was a much larger march planned for downtown Los Angeles we chose to go to the smaller community of Santa Monica because it’s where my brother, sister and I went to high school. No matter where else I live, it’s the city I’ll always consider home.

Thousands marched in Santa MonicaWe met my brother Russ & my sister in law Eva at their place—they’re lucky enough to still live in Santa Monica, just blocks …

Being the new kid in school is never easy. Add a dash of freezing cold weather and your first day at a new school just sucks. Here’s a day from my early days in Niagara Falls.

Snow Day

It was only a few miles from our gloomy old house on Ryerson Crescent to our family’s new split level across town in Cherrywood Acres but it could just as easily have been light years away. It was a whole different world out there in the barely built development where the cherry orchards used to be, everything bright and shiny and newer than new.

We moved to the new neighborhood in the middle of fifth grade, in the middle of winter. I hated Niagara Falls in the winter, when sometimes it got so cold that the falls actually froze, the water turned into ice sculptures as it churned over the bank of the Niagara River. The cold, the snow, the ice and the hockey, I hated it all. But there was no escape. Read the rest of the story [Snow Day ...]